Linkspam: snails, making friends with failure, and #ManicureMonday

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

Bit of a gloomy question for a winter opener, but deconstructs some assumptions fairly well: what should I do with my life?

Via tumblr, a comic on making friends with failure. (No transcript or alt text - apologies.)

Two Colours In My Head writes about dressing up, gendering of colours, and parenting a toddler who loves snails.

Volunteering and meritocracy: the ethics of unpaid labour and the open source software community.

GeekFeminism has curated their top picks of what happens when scientists join in on teen-magazine hashtag #ManicureMonday.

... and finally, at 8pm on the 26th (today! Tuesday!), there will be a twitter club/conversation using the hashtag #NHSgenderID, focussing on gender as non-binary, and the experiences of people with "non-traditional" genders in the healthcare system. For all it'll be a hard conversation, we hope to see some of you there!

Linkspam

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

Sorry for the hiatus, folk - it's been a busy month for lots of us. To make up for it, here's a bumper edition of all the links we've been saving up...

It's the start of term, and mixosaurus has written a fantastic guide on accessing mental health support as a student.

Labour has promised that if they are elected in 2015 they'll create a new offence of disability hate crime - and they've promised to sack Atos from carrying out Work Capability Assessments, a deeply flawed test to establish whether people are too ill to work.

[Content note: addiction] Revisiting a landmark establishment on addictive behaviour in rats shows it's not the morphine, it's the size of the cage - with serious implications for "wars on drugs" and medical gatekeeping surrounding "addictive" substances.

Also in science-and-animals news, tumblr wants you to have a review of non-reproductive and apparently-homosexual sex among animals. Fascinating but sweary! [Content note: rape.]

In the trans news corner, we've got:

• The Transadvocate runs an article entitled Creating a world without fear, an appeal to cis people (by a cis person) about how to be less awful
• LashFriend and all-round magnificent being CN Lester has written an article on misgendering
• Open-Minded Health features a Trans 101 for Trans People
• there's a collation at Storify entitled The Gingerbread Plagiarist, highlighting a cis dude taking credit for work that originated among trans communities
• ... and, distressingly, Wikipedia has gone all-in on cissexism

Conference organisers various have been awful, including a staggeringly misogynistic sceptical "major science talk", and some difficult community conversations about Science Online [content note: sexual harassment, abuse of power].

In the arts, The Belle Jar wrote an open letter to David Gilmour; Bad Reputation is fed up with the salacious fascination with Jack the Ripper; and Sondheim is working on a revised, queerer version of the 1970 musical Company!

In awesome geek ladies news, Miss America holds a degree in Brain Behaviour and is a Star Wars cosplayer... and this doesn't seem to have been celebrated anywhere, because of the overwhelming interest in being staggeringly racist about her. Related reading at Sociological Images.

Raisa Kabir has written a solid article at the f-word about the horrible tack discourse in the UK is currently taking with respect to veiling.

And finally for this bumper edition, have some cheerful science stuff:

• Mystery alignment of planetary nebulae discovered!
• Knitting used to visualise crystal structures in a massive community art project!
• You can't vaccinate octopuses!
• ... and a global social community of geek-types with anti-oppression as a core principle has been set up!

Linkspam: nuns, football, and the idea of youth

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

On women in tech: An open letter to my daughter's high school programming teacher. It's rather grim, but just maybe this time the message will get through. (But probably it won't.) Content notes at the link.

For contrast, have a look at this Weird Future article: We Have Always Coded, using perfectly common-sense arguments to explain why it is that male participation in computer science has lagged well below female participation levels throughout the history of the subject.

Lots of queer news this week: Ireland's launched an attack on anti-"gay" bullying (kaberett would like to note that even their rural Catholic mother manages better than to use "gay" as shorthand for LGBT+, but there we go). A top Russian lawyer has come out as trans and bisexual in protest against the current legal situation for LGBT+ folk in Russia - we've found the story at GayStarNews and at PinkNews.

Meanwhile Stonewall is asking pro footballers to wear rainbow laces. Gentle readers, we'd love your thoughts on this one.

Janani at Black Girl Dangerous writes it's my birthday and I'll disrupt heteronormative time if I want to, an excellent article on provision of youth services:

I also want to offer that age frequently operates differently for queer people.  For example, I haven't spent a long time living as my current gender, compared to most cisgender people.  I'm still figuring out many of the ways I articulate and build the experience of being in my body.  Of course, this articulation looks very different for me, versus if I had been a gender-variant toddler, in that I have access to the language of the adult world and the income to curate my presentation.  There are trans* folks who self-determine their genders at much later stages of life, and ones who do so almost at infancy, but the common factor is that we're flipping the script on our lives in one way that cis people do not.  This makes the way I think about time, and memories, fundamentally different.

As if to illustrate the appalling mess that is the way the government of England & Wales is currently handling benefits, officials who caught benefits cheat found she was entitled to more than she stole.

And finally - and cheerfully - meet this BBC profile of Europe's best-known anti-capitalist-activist nun.

What have you been reading, writing and thinking this week?

Linkspam: Dr Who, literary criticism, and convention accessibility

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time


naamah_darling has hit it out of the park twice this week - once on tumblr, in a difficult conversation with Boggle the Owl [content note: depression], and once on Dreamwidth about learning to live with limitations of chronic illness.

Frith - occasional creator of this-world Mechanisms octokitties - talks about writing canonically gay characters as straight, or at least in relationships with members of different genders. Excellent - if difficult - conversation in comments.

Meanwhile at Amptoons, Grace gives us an anecdote about policework while trans [content notes: severe mental illness, bed shortages].

The principal conductor of the National Youth Orchestra (among his other job descriptions) made some hideously sexist comments. Sarah Connolly FRCM, a fantastic mezzo-soprano, lets him have it.

We've been seeing an article from solopoly.net doing the rounds: Riding the relationship escalator (or not). Good description of cultural expectations of relationships, and discussion of other ways it's possible to structure them.

Poet, editor and all-round rockstar Rose Lemberg has been writing about accessibility at conventions following some frankly appalling efforts at WorldCon. Part the first: Disability, Diversity, Dignity. Part the second: Disability access and being a bystander. Excellent suggestions for how to change culture, there.

Relatedly, here's an article about some of the ways the BBC is being shit to a disabled Dr Who fan [content note: jokes about addictive drugs] which are staggeringly disappointing - especially because they can and have done so much better.

In a much better but actually related vein, queer actress Heather Peace has announced her ambition to be the first female Doctor - and we're delighted that the reasoning she gives has made it to the mainstream (the BBC, no less!).

And let's continue pretending there's plausible segues: j4 takes down the phrase "having it all", and the way it's only ever applied to female parents.

Good news: preliminary results from the Queer in STEM study are in, and they made kaberett smile like anything.

Aaaaaaaand finally for this week, tansyrrr looks at the evolution of gender politics and portrayal of women in Pratchett's Discworld series.

Comments on any of the above? What have you been reading, thinking or writing this week?

Linkspam: mixed martial arts, Postsecret, and Occupation of the BBC

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

Yesterday, members of Disabled People Against the Cuts & other disability groups occupied the BBC, to draw attention to the way that the BBC is complicit in demonising people receiving disability-related benefits (and benefits in general). Unfortunately their press release seems to have gone offline, but here's a collection of tweets on the topic.

The Pervocracy talks about sex and respect and kindness [content notes: BDSM, including kidnap scene in context of consensual scene]: Everything you learned from Mister Rogers about how you treat other  people--that's how you treat other people when you're fucking them, too.   It's simple stuff, mostly, and you don't need some Sex Expert to  dispense Sex Wisdom to know it: Be honest. Ask permission before  touching things that aren't yours. Be safe.  Don't bully or make fun of  people.  Don't  throw tantrums when you don't get everything you want.   Keep your promises.  Use your words.  Brush your teeth.

Meanwhile at Rewriting the Rules, Meg Barker thinks about kindness & honesty, and the ways in which they're interdependent.

The current trans rep at Cambridge University has put together a linkspam about degendering the graduation dress codes [content note: disableist blog title].

[Content notes: domestic violence, victim-blaming, murder] This Sunday PostSecret included a murder confession - that Frank Warren had held onto for at least four years without reporting to the police, assuming it was a hoax. Activist EllieMurasaki has put together some links on the topic.

HuffPo has run an article brilliantly illustrating the ways in which before & after photographs are misleading -- even in the absence of photo manipulation!

... and finally, over at out.com, we've got a profile of the first out trans Mixed Martial Arts competitor. There is, unfortunately, a lot of predictable cissexism -- but it only appears in quotations, with the article itself being very respectful and largely focussed on just how amazing Fallon Fox is.

What have you been reading, writing, or thinking about this week?

Linkspam: trans rights, food stamps, and Benedict Cumberbatch

Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time

Collapsed in a post-Edinburgh heap...

From the US, lydy has written an excellent article about why food stamps matter, along with fantastic discussion in comments [content notes: poverty, food scarcity, debt, abuse].

Closer to home for Lashings, the UK government removed explicit protection for trans kids from its guidelines on teaching the national curriculum, but rapidly reinstated it following petitions & other pressure. Natacha Kennedy has submitted a Freedom of Information request; watch this space...

Back across the pond - but remaining on the topic of trans people - have a linkspam on the theme of Chelsea Manning.

And kaberett has suddenly jumped on the BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH SO FANTASTIC bandwagon - having seen him using a crowd of photographers to send a political message to the UK government [images, no transcript].

What have you been reading, writing or thinking about this week?

Reclaiming Physicality and Performance

 Posted by Astra

Before joining Lashings, I hadn't been on stage in five years. In the interim, my creativity had been channelled through a laptop in words and visuals. And a lot of it still is, and I love that. But performing on a stage again has given me back a mode of expression that I'd missed terribly -- using the whole of my body to tell a story.

For me, the best parts of any kind of creative process are the moments when it consumes me -- glancing at the clock and realising that hours have passed while I've been doing nothing but hammering out the next part of a story or storyboarding a video. With something like writing, that doesn't happen all the time, and that's okay. It's perfectly possible to get excellent work done without the lightning bolt of inspiration.

But the nature of performance is immersive. I don't know what other performers' experiences of their work are like, but for me, if I'm not wholly invested in the moment when I'm on stage, I'm not doing a good job. And there's something thrilling about that, the way that inhabiting a role or an act requires all of my mind and body.

I'm used to creativity being a mental activity, but performing with Lashings has brought the physical back, and it's wonderful. I have to think about my stance, my mannerisms, my voice and my facial expressions and use them all in combination to communicate to a live audience, a vastly different experience than sitting at a desk writing a story. It's terrifying and really quite exhilarating.

I'm used to the kinds of pursuits that require skills like talking and listening, not running and dancing. But acting requires me to find a physicality that I usually ignore. Here at the Fringe, as Fanny Whittington nears the end of its second week, every part of me from head to toe is involved in what I'm doing. Every night I am bounding onto stage and demanding that an audience looks at me, not just my face but my whole body. It's frightening, not just to accept but to demand that kind of attention, but it's rewarding too.

So many of us at Lashings are from groups who are constantly told that our physical appearance is not good enough, that it not does not conform enough to narrow standards set out by society at large. As members of marginalised and oppressed groups we are so often told that we should neither be seen nor heard. But all of us get up on stage and we charm and delight our audience and we are fantastic just as we are. It's a wonderful thing to be a part of. I get a huge amount from it, and I hope some of our audience does too.

In an hour I'm going to get into costume and breathe life into Ali Chapman for the penultimate time. I will sing, dance, laugh, shout and perform for an audience for an entire hour, just like I've been doing every night for two weeks, and I can't wait.

Damn, it's good to rip the label off.

Fanny Whittington is on tonight and tomorrow night, 20:15, Gryphon Venues, Bread Street, Edinburgh.